The lights of the Colosseum has been ceremoniously turned off at 8 pm today reporting N1 TV from Rome.

Apparently, several Finnish tourists were disappointed about switching off the lights because they wanted to see the monument fully lit up reporting N1 TV.
The ceremony has been attended by about 200-250 invited guests including Hungarian Ambassador to Rome János Balla; when the ambassador was asked why he was attending the event he gave evasive answers remarking that as an ambassador he is required to attend these sorts of events. On the other hand, he was eager to stress that the Orbán government introduced the Holocaust memorial day, abolished paramilitary organizations (the Hungarian Guard), and made crystal clear that the Hungarian government protects all Jews and Gypsies.

One of the speakers of the event was MP Fiamma Nirenstein who a few days ago called upon the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly to deny Jobbik MP Tamás Gaudi-Nagy and Golden Dawn MP Eleni Zaroulia's admission into the European body.

In her fiery speech, Nirenstein told guests that she just came back from Hungary where she experienced raging antisemitism; she was also stunned to see that Jobbik is getting stronger by the day and picking up public support. Fascism and Nazism are definitely on the rise said Nirenstein; then, she repeated several times that Jews in Italy are strong and they won't let history repeat itself.

Before the ceremony started, Nirenstein talked to N1 TV stressing that Hungarian Jews are in a very difficult situation; they live in raw fear so much so that they don't dare to wear kippah publicly. She also remarked that gypsy crime in Hungary is a fiction; then, she revealed that she collected several pages of anti-Semitic and racist statements made by Jobbik MP Tamás Gaudi-Nagy.

2
comments:

Modern Liberalism is the dominant paradigm in the US, and it plays a major role in Europe, in post-Soviet Russia and elsewhere. This line is preached by the powerful world-wide mass media syndicate whose elements are ostensibly independent yet they transmit the identical message James Petras has called The Tyranny of Liberalism. A “liberal tyranny” may strike some as oxymoronic if not a contradiction in terms since Liberalism likes to represent itself as the neutral ground of freedom rather than as an ideology and as an arbiter of religious pluralism and freedom rather than an anti-religious ideology. Liberalism is the ideology than denies that it is such a thing; ask a liberal and he will tell you he is against the dominance of any ideology or of any religion.

In our attempt to pierce this protective colouring we shall apply some ideas of the late German thinker Carl Schmitt who learned of liberalism the hard way. After Germany was subdued and conquered in 1945, Carl Schmitt lived for a while in the Soviet and the American occupation zones, which were later converted into the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany. On the basis of his comparative experience in the occupation, Carl Schmitt noticed that American Liberalism is a militant ideology less prone to compromise than Soviet Communism. The Americans demanded that Schmitt give proof of belief in Liberal Democracy, while the Russians never asked him to swear an oath upon the Communist Manifesto. This personal experience led Schmitt to conclude that the Modern American Liberalism is not an ideology-free live-and-let-live paradigm, but a positive ideology, and an ideology even more dangerous than the Communism he greatly disliked. Schmitt saw the traditional balance of power threatened by the new triumphant Anglo-American air and sea global imperium based on an aggressive ideology. For this reason he welcomed the Cold War, as he thought the USSR the only force capable of containing the American ideological drive.

In recent years with the American invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, many others have come to share Schmitt’s realization that Liberalism is an aggressive global ideology calling for certain principles to be implemented world-wide by force of arms. These principles can be described either in positive or negative terms: a restaurant guest and an oyster would describe the arrival of Chablis and lemon in different ways. Much depends on whether you eat or you are eaten. Let’s have a look at the menu from a dual perspective.

· Human rights OR denial of Collective Rights.

· Minority Rights OR denial of Majority Rights.

· Non-governmental ownership of media OR exclusive right of Capital to form public opinion.

· Women rights and protection OR dissolution of family.

· Homosexual unions OR denial of the sanctity of marriage

· Antiracism OR denial of “the need for roots” in Weil’s terms.

· Economic self-reliance, OR ban on social mutual help (in theological terms agape and charity)

· Separation of Church and State OR freedom for anti-Christian propaganda and a ban on Christian mission in the public sphere.

· Public elections of government («democracy»), limited by voters’ conformity to the liberal paradigm, OR denial of authentic self-determination.

Carl Schmitt postulated an important assumption: every ideology is a crypto-religious doctrine, or in his words, «all of the most pregnant concepts of modern doctrine are secularized theological concepts». Let us compare Communism and Liberalism in the light of this insight.